The science of dataviz, with Jen Christiansen

The Data Journalism Podcast

Jen Christiansen is the author of Building Science Graphics (published by A K Peters/CRC Press) and a senior graphics editor at Scientific American.

In this episode of the pod, she talks about her approach to visualising scientific stories and to graphics, based on her long career in the field. "For any scientist to have their work in the lab or in the field and be worthwhile, you need to communicate it to someone - whether you're communicating it to your peers or to the broader public or to funders ... And I think that most training has been focused on making sure people can write, but we don't have a lot of training for everyone in terms of design fundamentals and different languages you can use that are pictorial to help get your point across and to help people have greater understanding of what it is that you're doing."

The music this week, made with TwoTone, is Radio Observations of the Pulse Profiles and Dispersion Measures of Twelve Pulsars from this dataset, supplied to us by Jen.